The pool of trapped water stretched forty paces across the sunken roadway, dead and milky white under the midday glare.
Fellis dropped his pack against the last dry kerb stone, uncoiling his hemp climbing line with practiced speed. He looked across the flooded hollow to where a thick, ancient hawthorn tree leaned out from the opposite bank. Its gnarled roots gripped a limestone ledge five feet above the surface of the pool.
“We don’t have to wade that soup, Kezra,” the ropewright said, swinging an iron grappling hook lightly in his right hand. “I can throw this flanged hook into the hawthorn crotch on the third cast. We tension a traverser line between that trunk and this kerb stone, rig a canvas sling under your arms. You can haul yourself across dry as a loaf of hearth bread. Or better yet, we lead the mule across the higher turf bank upstream. You ride across in the saddle.”
Kezra stood at the very lip of the water. The chalky liquid lapped against the toes of her boots. That left a thin, grey scum of suspended marl on the blackened leather.
She slipped her hand inside her coat, touching the cold brass clasp of the bonded survey notebook. She didn’t open the covers. Through the leather and linen, she could feel the faint, rhythmic pulse of the walked thread hum against her ribs. But right at the edge of the puddle, the sensation changed—it didn’t extend forward into the water. It hovered at her boot tips like a candle flame held against a draft.
“No,” Kezra said, her voice quiet and steady.
Fellis stopped spinning the grapple. “What do you mean, no? That water looks three feet deep. It’s choked with cold chalk runoff from the upper pastures. You’ll soak your breeches to the waist, and Paxa will have you drinking willow bark tea until your tongue goes numb.”
“If you rig a rope traverser and haul me across in a sling,” Kezra said, turning to face him, “my boots will be hanging eighteen inches above the pool. The air between this bank and that hawthorn trunk isn’t walked earth. The bonded book doesn’t record aerial acrobatics, Fellis. The moment my toes leave this stone, the thread snaps. And if I ride the mule across the upper bog, the thread records the mule’s hooves, not mine. The link to Kilnstep will be cut before we even reach the foothills.”
Fellis lowered the grappling hook, staring at her with genuine confusion. “You’re telling me you have to physically step on the bottom? Even if the bottom is under three feet of mud?”
“Not mud,” Kezra said, taking her iron-shod sounding rod in both hands. “Bedrock. Or solid stonework. As long as my boots press down against nonstop, load-bearing stone that connects to the roadway, the walked connection holds. But it has to be real stone, and I have to walk it myself.”
Paxa walked up beside them, leading the mule by its halter. The animal eyed the white pool with deep suspicion, snorting softly and refusing to place its forehooves within a yard of the edge.
“She’s right, Fellis,” Paxa said, testing the water with the tip of her walking switch. “A map maker who cheats her own rules is just an expensive storyteller. But if you think I’m letting her march twenty miles through cold wind with sodden wool around her ankles, you’re both mistaken. We find the solid piers, or we rebuild the crossing.”
Yseld stepped past them without a word. The guide had already unhitched her hooked climbing staff and unlaced her tall rawhide gaiters. It rolled her heavy wool trousers up past her knees. Her legs were pale and heavily muscled, crisscrossed with old, white scars from mountain rock-falls and barbed wire.
She stepped into the milky pool.
The water rose instantly past her ankles, swirling white and solid around her calves. She used the iron hook of her staff to probe the murky bottom ahead of her steps, moving forward with slow, deliberate shuffles.
“The original roadway paving is still here,” Yseld called back, her voice echoing off the flooded banks. “Ten paces out, the stones are intact—water is mid-calf. But right here in the center. There, the old under-road drain arch blew out, there’s a gap six paces wide. The bottom drops into soft silt up to my thighs.”
“Can we bridge it?” Kezra asked, already sitting on the kerb stone to unlace her own boots.
“We don’t have timber for a bridge,” Yseld replied, dragging her staff through the silt. “But the collapsed coping stones from the low roof wall are lying right here on the lip of the hole. Big dressed limestone slabs, three feet long and four inches thick. If we roll three of them into the center gap, we can make an underwater stepping-raised stone road.”
For the next hour, there was no mapmaking, no magic, and no theoretical shape. There was only the brutal, freezing manual labor of moving wet stone through ice-cold chalk water.
Kezra stripped off her heavy woollen stockings, tied them securely around her neck inside her pack flap. Then they rolled her canvas breeches to her hips. She took the bonded survey notebook from its inner coat pocket, checked that the waxed deerhide envelope was sealed watertight with sheep fat. Then she lashed the packet high against her collarbone with a length of braided linen twine, directly over her throat where no water could reach it even if she stumbled into a hole.
She stepped into the pool.
The cold hit her like an iron band snapping around her shins. The water was runoff from the high limestone benches, barely a few degrees above freezing, soaked with dissolved chalk that stung the small scratches on her ankles.
Together, Kezra, Fellis, and Yseld waded into the waist-deep hollow where the under-road drain had collapsed. Beneath the solid surface, they used Fellis’s iron crowbar and their bare hands to pry at the underwater stonework slabs. The limestone was slick with river algae and heavy as lead, each block requiring all three of them to lift all at once, their boots slipping on the greasy clay bottom as they hauled the stones upright and rolled them into the breach.
One. The first heavy coping slab dropped into the silt with a muffled, sucking thud, settling eight inches below the surface of the pool.
Two. The second slab jammed against the broken bridge pillar of the under-road drain pier, its flat upper face creating a solid stone tread sixteen inches wide.
Three. The final slab wedged tightly between the other two. He locked the underwater row into a rigid, nonstop stone spine that spanned the deep center gap.
Kezra stood in the middle of the pool, her teeth chattering so hard her jaw ached, the water swirling cold against the tops of her thighs.
She took her sounding rod. She planted the iron shoe firmly onto the first underwater stepping stone, and stepped forward.
Her bare left foot came down on the flat, dressed limestone slab. The surface was cold, slimy with moss, and fully hidden beneath eighteen inches of milky white water. But the stone was solid, unmoving. Then it directly anchored into the underlying stonework of the old under-road drain pier.
She took another step. Her right foot found the center slab.
Inside the waxed packet lashed against her throat, she felt a sudden, distinct pulse of warmth—steady, sharp, and clean. The amber thread didn’t break. It followed her across the underwater stones, tracing each footfall through the cold water with the exact, unbending fidelity of the earth itself.
“Step clean!” Kezra called out, her voice shivering but triumphant. “The connection is holding!”
“Get out of that pond before your toes turn purple, Venn!” Paxa barked from the dry eastern bank.
Kezra waded the leftover ten paces of shallow water. She climbed up onto the dry gravel of the eastern raised stone road. Behind her, Yseld and Fellis took the mule’s lead rope, coaxing the reluctant animal across the underwater raised stone road with gentle whistles and firm pulls on the bit until the beast lunged up onto the dry bank with a loud snort of relief.
On the road verge, Paxa didn’t waste a second. She threw a dry wool blanket over Kezra’s trembling shoulders, shoved her down onto a flat boulder. Then she went to work on her feet.
With a rough linen towel, the healer vigorously rubbed the chalk paste from Kezra’s toes, soles, and calves until the white skin turned angry red with returning blood. From her leather satchel, Paxa drew a clay pot of yellow sheep fat infused with crushed pine resin and bitter pine-resin. She scooped out a generous glob and worked it deep into Kezra’s heels, between her toes, and around her nail beds with hard, punishing strokes of her thumbs.
“Ouch!” Kezra hissed, trying to pull her foot back. “Paxa, that hurts!”
“Of course it hurts,” Paxa snapped, not easing the pressure of her hands for an instant. “Trench foot doesn’t care about your map maker’s pride, girl. If you leave wet chalk silt between your toes, the lime eats through your skin by nightfall, the blisters turn black with camp rot by morning, and in three days you’re riding in a litter while your companions drag your pack. A soldier can survive missing two meals. A soldier who neglects her boots is a corpse on a stretcher. Now hold still while I grease your ankles.”
Only when her feet were fully dry, greased with animal fat. Then she wrapped in clean, dry spare wool stockings did Paxa allow Kezra to pull her leather boots back on and lace the gaiters tight.
They didn’t camp beside the flooded creek. Yseld insisted on marching two more miles east. She pushed the file up a long, rising slope where the pasture thinned into stony upland scrub, until they reached the sheltered lee of an old abandoned limestone quarry.
By the time they hauled their packs over the quarry lip, the sun was sinking behind the western ridges. It cast long, purple shadows across the vast plain of the east.
Kezra climbed to the highest stone bench of the quarry. She leaned heavily on her staff as the cold wind whipped her hair across her face. Beside her, Yseld raised her hooked climbing staff. She pointed toward the darkening horizon three miles ahead.
The pale limestone pastures were ending. Ahead, rising out of the chalk plain like a huge black wall, the jagged, shattered ridges of the Blackglass country loomed against the twilight sky.
And sitting right at the foot of those dark fiery slopes, beside the pale ribbon of the road, a solitary square platform of dressed white stone stood stark against the grey scrub. Behind it, half-swallowed by shadow, sat the roofless, crumbling walls of an ancient weighing station.